The Past Comes Back to Haunt Green Arrow in Mid Season Finale

While The Flash closed out the year with a deadly vision of the future, Green Arrow was tormented by his past in Wednesday night’s mid season finale. It looks like Oliver gave rise to the terrifying villain Prometheus during his early outings as a vigilante, but the Throwing Star Killer isn’t the only blast from the past — Laurel is alive.

Laurel’s appearance, in the grim closing moments of the episode, was a total surprise and there doesn’t appear to be any explanation as to what the hell is going on just yet. We don’t even know if it’s really her, but if it is, maybe she’s strange proof that not everything that Oliver touches dies, as Prometheus declared.

We still don’t really know for sure who is under Prometheus’s mask (well, Billy was, but that was a horrible trick on the real villain’s part). However, we have a pretty good guess, and this one seems like less of a red herring than Quentin’s blackouts. It looks like he’s being set up to be the illegitimate son of Justin Claybourne, a truly despicable pharmaceutical who was on “The List.” If Prometheus isn’t actually related to Claybourne, then he’s certainly leaning into that misconception, because everything about his showdown with Oliver references Green Arrow’s more murderous past.

It was an exceptionally dark finale. Billy died at Oliver’s hand, Diggle got caught, Curtis was dumped, and Laurel is somehow back, just after Oliver made peace with her death for what we thought was the final time.

The next episode of Arrow isn’t until January 18. Maybe things will start to turn around for the Arrow team (and make sense for us viewers) in 2017.